Among the multitude of ‘compatriot’ organisations that began springing up in great numbers with Putin’s rise to power, one was a long-standing institution.
MAPRYAL, the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, was founded back in 1967 in Paris. It brought together, first and foremost, foreign Slavicists and Russianists, and from 1969 onwards held its congresses every year. Until 1990, these were held in socialist countries – Moscow, Budapest, Varna, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague – and subsequently in other countries, including West Germany, China and Spain.
The opportunities that regular contact with Russian language teachers and Slavicists from around the world opened up for the Soviet secret services cannot be overestimated. For those studying Russian professionally, the chance to visit the USSR and interact with Soviet colleagues was a vital necessity. MAPRYAL made it possible to turn such contacts into permanent ones and facilitated the recruitment of suitable individuals. In the post-Soviet era, foreign Slavicists were joined by ‘compatriots’ – émigrés – teaching in countless Russian schools around the world, whilst using Russian curricula and textbooks. There is no need to explain the propaganda potential inherent in this.
In 1977, the MAPRYAL award – the A.S. Pushkin Medal – was established ‘For outstanding contributions to the promotion of the Russian language’. MAPRYAL organised numerous events in collaboration with the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Foundation, which came under sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We will discuss ‘Russkiy Mir’ in more detail later; what is important here is that its primary function is to fund Russia’s foreign agents of influence.
MAPRYAL’s headquarters are in St Petersburg. Whilst the MAPRYAL Presidium includes representatives from various countries, the entire secretariat is Russian. At the MAPRYAL General Assembly, held in 2019 in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, Vladimir Tolstoy – a trusted confidant of Putin and his adviser on cultural affairs – was elected president of MAPRYAL, which immediately dispels any doubts regarding the association’s subordination, political orientation and objectives.
MAPRYAL’s partners, as listed on its website, are the Russkiy Mir Foundation, the Russian Academy of Education, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, Rossotrudnichestvo, the Russian Humanitarian Mission, the International Federation of Teachers of Living Languages (FIPLV), and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. There is only one genuine non-governmental organisation on this list (FIPLV). All the others are Russian state agencies and their offshoots.
MAPRYAL has over 200 members in 79 countries. In Germany, there are eight collective and individual members. In Cyprus, there is one.
The MAPRYAL Presidium includes representatives from China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Sweden, Senegal, Romania, the Czech Republic, Iran, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Argentina, India, Moldova, the USA and Russia. There is no reason to believe that they all represent independent civil society organisations that have arisen spontaneously and are not funded by Russia. This is a vast network of agents with an extremely convenient cover that, at first glance, raises no suspicion. Its officials are, as a rule, simultaneously involved in other emigrant civil society organisations, primarily the Co-ordination Councils of Russian Compatriots, and are all linked to Rossotrudnichestvo, the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Foundation and other sources of Russian state funding. MAPRYAL is actively engaged in international activities. Events were planned for 2024 (outside Russia) in the USA, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Belarus, Peru, Slovakia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Iran, the Congo, Argentina, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Ecuador, Moldova, Senegal, Romania, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Ireland, with several events scheduled in many of these countries. This in itself speaks to the scale of MAPRYAL’s funding.